Black Coffee
by theprofessorslove
Summary: Her coffee is strong and fiery, burning all the way down her throat. Only now, however, does this rampant burning seem tolerable; in fact, she sometimes thinks she'd be lost without it.


**_Black Coffee_**

Detective Olivia Benson can honestly say that she has the most bizarre of mornings. After all, who else can say that they were awakened before dawn to hear about a gang rape of a five year old?

It's unsettling, to say the least, but one has to learn to stomach it, and soon the disgust passes like a cup of coffee: keeping one awake and restless at times, but eventually passing through the body to become a familiar part of the morning routine.

"Benson."

She no longer says 'hello' anymore because it's a formality, and an oblique way to start any conversation. When one has to find people that are scarring the innocence of children and destroying the maturity of adults, there is no time for formalities. Things like that just seem to lose their significance.

"Central Park, Liv. I'll be there in fifteen."

Her partner also understands this blunt nature of conversation: it's almost their own language. Location and time. And occasionally, an affectionate acknowledgement or moniker: a three-letter, monosyllabic way of saying, "I understand." And between them, that's enough.

In a world like theirs, simplicity is desired: a utopian dream of minimalism. Others, the less experienced, self-proclaimed all-knowing, would call this boredom. She knows what she's seen, however; and compared to that, nothingness would be paradise.

It is with this defeated, slightly disparaging attitude that Olivia Benson steps out of her apartment building at four o'clock in the am. She's not angry though; she probably wouldn't have slept anyway. Things like this, insomnia and depression, are standard for people like her: it's them, and only them, who see every side to humanity. It's impossible for separation of the two worlds: the proverbial bridge has disappeared to leave only one world left: one where a potential rapist, or rape victim, could be in the same grocery store. She has come to accept that paranoia is no longer a mental defect: it's necessary vigilance.

"What do we got?"

It's their official greeting to the morning, partnered with a cup of scalding hot coffee. Ever since she's been a detective, Olivia has had to forgo her previous breakfast ritual of homemade coffee, sugar, and milk. Now, she drinks black coffee; straight-up. She no longer has time to cradle the sweet cream gliding down her throat, waiting a few minutes to let the liquid cool. No, her coffee is strong and fiery, burning all the way down her esophagus until it reaches the pit of her stomach. Only now, however, does this rampant burning seems tolerable; in fact, she sometimes thinks she'd be lost without it.

"Eighteen year old female," says Elliot, as if reading statistics from a "get to know me" pamphlet. In a sense, this makes her feel disrespectful; as if she's undermining all the achievements of this one person, and defining them solely as a victim. But then again, she has it tougher than any of the other cops out there: she has to relive the pain of the victims. It's emotionally exhausting, finding the broken ones and putting them back together: she sometimes sees herself as living in a state of perpetual empathy, punctuated by moments of unbearable, undiscriminating anger. She always thinks of how much worse it would be if she couldn't fix them: if she was, for once in her many years of a rather tumultuous existence, rendered helpless. She's always find someway to _help_; not helping has never been an option. It's always been a matter of where, when, and how soon.

"Name?" she asks, silently canvassing the crime scene with her eyes.

"Marie St. Clair."

"Where is she now?"

"Paramedics just got her five minutes ago."

"Condition?"

She always hesitates a moment before asking this question, and Elliot knows this. She relishes in her moment of transitory ignorance; one more moment in which she is spared the horror of human nature.

"Raped and unconscious. Perp beat the shit out of her. Medics say she'll live."

At times, Olivia can see the blatant irony in these sentence fragments: these jumbled, nonsensical words, not even full sentences, seem to be the only way one can possibly express something so utterly horrifying. How could one summarize this overwhelming, life-shattering pain of being violated and humiliated? The absence of every emotion, the emptiness, and the self-deprecation: can that be adequately condensed into _pain_, which is only, ultimately, a hollow sounding, four-letter word?

The first thing Olivia notices when she enters Marie St. Clair's hospital room are two coffee-stained brown eyes. They barely acknowledge her presence, not even a nervous flicker when two unknown faces enter the room.

She lies there, immobile, listening to the even, monotonous beeping of pricey hospital equipment: a reassurance, or perhaps, a painful reminder, that she is alive.

"Are you the detectives?" she asks, her voice dull and lackluster, her eyes still transfixed by nothingness.

"Yes," Elliot says. "I'm Elliot, and this is Olivia."

Elliot always uses their first names for the more emotionally traumatized victims, an indication, an inside joke by their standards, that Elliot picked up on the same emptiness that she did. Olivia supposes that it was the eyes that gave her away.

"What do you want me to tell you?"

"Whatever you can remember," Olivia responds in a soothing, gentle tone, as if babying the victim will somehow take her pain away.

"I remember everything."

At this moment, Olivia isn't sure if she should be alarmed or excited; the former due to the horror of the event, the latter because her job here is virtually painless.

Olivia is immediately snapped back to reality as she sees the intensity of the eyes that are purposely avoiding her face. For a second, she almost believes those trite clichés that romanticize the depth of the eyes. She feels as if she's heading, head first, to an infinite black hole of pain and emptiness, as if she's transcended all physical and empirical barriers to achieve complete emotional unity and understanding. Ultimately, she realizes, there is no distinction between the painful and the painless; they've morphed into one world where both everything and nothing is sacred.


End file.
